Explainer · Policy Decoded

The 70% Question: Decoding Kenya’s National Livestock Research Agenda, 2025–2035

A new ten-year roadmap quietly admits that Kenya’s herds, flocks and hives are performing at barely a third of what they could. Here is what the document actually says — stripped of the jargon — and what it means for farmers, scientists and investors.

Buried on page one of Kenya’s newest livestock policy document is a sentence that should stop every cattle keeper, dairy farmer and pastoralist in the country. The sector, it states plainly, is producing at about one-third of what its existing animals could deliver. In other words, roughly 70 per cent of the country’s livestock potential is being left on the table — lost to disease, poor feed, weak breeding and a research system that has never quite pulled in one direction. The National Livestock Research Agenda (NLRA) 2025–2035, finalised by the State Department for Livestock Development, is the government’s ten-year plan to close that gap. It is dense, technical and easy to ignore. It also matters more than its bureaucratic packaging suggests.

What this document actually is

First, what it is not. The NLRA is not a subsidy scheme, a production target or a budget. It is a research roadmap — a single, prioritised list of the questions Kenya’s scientists, universities and institutes should be answering about livestock over the next decade, and the order in which they should answer them.

That sounds modest. It is not. For years, livestock research in Kenya has been scattered across dozens of bodies — KALRO, ILRI, universities, regulators, donors — each pursuing its own projects, often duplicating effort, frequently chasing whatever a foreign funder happened to be paying for. The NLRA is the first serious attempt in over a decade to give all of them a common to-do list. Carried under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, with a foreword from Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe and a preface from Principal Secretary Jonathan Mueke, it was built over roughly three years of desk review and stakeholder workshops, drawing on more than forty contributing institutions and even benchmarking against Tanzania’s and Sri Lanka’s livestock research plans.

The number that frames everything

The livestock sector is not a side-show in Kenya’s economy. By the document’s own accounting, it contributes around 12 per cent of national GDP and about 42 per cent of agricultural GDP, supplies over 30 per cent of all marketed farm produce, and employs roughly half the agricultural workforce. And the herd is vast and diverse.

Set that wealth against the 70 per cent shortfall and the document’s logic becomes clear: the problem is not that Kenya lacks animals. It is that each animal, on average, delivers a fraction of what it could. The agenda exists to find out why — systematically, and at scale.

Why it had to be written

The document is unusually candid about the rot in the research system itself. Livestock has long been the junior partner to crops: when agricultural research money is shared out, the report concedes, the crop side tends to win the administrative and budget battles, leaving livestock chronically underfunded. Worse, heavy reliance on donors has bent the research agenda toward foreign priorities rather than national ones. The 2012 policy that was meant to coordinate all this, the document admits, delivered “limited results.”

The result is a familiar list of failures: duplicated projects, “moribund” research that goes nowhere, weak links between scientists, extension officers and the farmers who are supposed to use the findings, and almost no tracking of whether any of it works. The NLRA is, in effect, an attempt to impose discipline — to make research demand-driven, coordinated and accountable.

Nine doors into one barn

The agenda organises everything into nine thematic areas. In plain terms, they ask:

Follow the priorities, follow the money

Nine themes are too many to fund at once, and the document knows it. So it does something most Kenyan strategy papers avoid: it ranks. Using a weighted scorecard — economic impact carries the most weight at 25 per cent, followed by the number of beneficiaries and policy alignment at 20 per cent each — it narrows the field to four strategic priorities and attaches hard numbers to each. This is the part worth reading twice, because it tells you where the effort, and eventually the money, is meant to go.

The single largest prize is value addition — and that is no accident, as the next section shows.

The uncomfortable numbers

If you read only one part of the agenda, read the value-addition chapter. It is where the polite language slips and the real scale of the lost opportunity shows through. The figures are blunt.

Honey tells the same story in miniature. Kenya could produce some 100,000 tonnes of honey a year. It produces around a quarter of that, consumes far more than it makes, and so — remarkably, for a country with this much bush — imports honey to fill the gap. The agenda’s point is consistent across every value chain: the animals are there, the demand is there, and the money is being lost somewhere between the farm and the shelf.

What’s genuinely new

Much of the agenda is familiar territory dressed in fresh language. But a few inclusions signal where the sector is heading. The document leans hard into digital tools — artificial intelligence for pasture monitoring, blockchain for traceability, mobile apps for disease surveillance, and a national livestock data platform to end the sector’s chronic information blindness. It embraces climate and carbon directly, with research lines on low-carbon livestock, methane from poorly managed herds, and carbon-credit financing. It formalises a One Health approach to zoonoses such as Rift Valley fever and African swine fever, and to antimicrobial resistance.

Two inclusions are striking for a livestock document. It devotes a full theme to companion animals and animals used in research — pets, the human-animal bond, and the ethical “3Rs” of replacement, reduction and refinement in animal experiments. And it takes non-conventional livestock seriously: crickets, black soldier fly, quails, guinea fowl, even crocodiles and silkworms, as routes to diversification, cheaper feed protein and new income.

Who has to make it happen — and will they?

Coordination falls to the Directorate of Livestock Policy, Research and Regulations, which is meant to keep the national institutes and the international research centres rowing in the same direction. The plan promises biennial independent reviews, annual reports to the Cabinet Secretary, a digital monitoring platform for real-time tracking, and an ethics committee signing off on any research using animals.

The honest question is whether it stays on the shelf. The agenda’s own history is a warning: the last coordination policy underdelivered, and the binding constraint — money — remains unresolved. Its boldest answer is to invoke the Kampala CAADP Declaration, under which states commit to put at least 10 per cent of public spending into agrifood systems and reinvest 15 per cent of agrifood GDP back into the sector. On paper, that would transform livestock research funding. Whether Kenya hits those numbers, in an era of fiscal squeeze, is the difference between this document mattering and gathering dust.

What it means for you

If you keep animals, the agenda is a signal of where support, breeding programmes, fodder research and disease tools will be aimed — with climate resilience and animal health flagged as the most urgent. If you process or trade, value addition is the single biggest declared prize, from leather and by-products to halal-certified and traceable meat; the door to export markets is explicitly on the table. If you research or teach, this is your funding compass for a decade — align proposals with the four priorities and you are pushing on an open door. If you invest, the numbers point clearly: KSh 50bn-plus in value-addition earnings, a leather sector exporting raw, and a honey market that imports to survive.

The bottom line

Strip away the acronyms and the NLRA is a single, useful admission followed by a plan. The admission: Kenya’s livestock sector runs at a third of its capacity, held back as much by a fragmented research system as by drought or disease. The plan: pick four fights worth winning — climate, value, health and data — coordinate the people who can win them, and fund them properly. The roadmap is sound. The destination depends, as always, on whether the resources follow the words.

Source: Kenya National Livestock Research Agenda 2025–2035, Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, State Department for Livestock Development. Figures and priorities as stated in the document; some are targets or estimates and may be revised in implementation.

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